or disorientation, low blood pressure, shallow, slow or laboured breathing, dry mouth, extremely constricted ‘pinpoint’ pupils, discoloured tongue, lips and fingernails turned blue, muscle and stomach spasms and constipation.
Jessica had seen the strange colour of Abigail’s tongue and had reported the blue of her lips – though, poor thing, she had assumed those were things that happened to every dead body. Abigail had been her first corpse.
It struck Madison that Abigail would have been just as clueless. Thank God, she had seen no such horrors in her short, bright life. That stuff had been left to Maddy, who had seen enough nastiness for both of them. She had done her best to spare her younger sister.
But she had not done enough.
The subject will typically pass out very rapidly in what may feel like a euphoric, rapturous rush. The breathing will slow, they will become cold and sweaty, the hair can become matted with sweat, excess saliva may exit the mouth, so that the subject can appear to be drooling, although the mouth will also be dry. Eventually, the breathing stops entirely and later the heart will follow.
None of that was any comfort now, but Maddy filed it away for later use: the meagre solace that her sister did not die in pain.
There was a bit more – about how heroin could elude an initial examination by a coroner because the key chemical agent disperses within the body after death – but none of it helped. She headed to the search window on the machine and typed the words ‘heroin’, ‘death’ and ‘Los Angeles’.
A raft of news stories appeared. New figures released by the Health and Human Services Department, the opening of a rehab clinic in Burbank, academic research on methadone by UCLA. She refined the search adding the initials, ‘LAPD’.
That turned up some brief stories from the Metro section of the LA Weekly:
A batch of heroin linked to a number of fatalities is believed to have claimed the life of a known drug user in South Central LA. The 33-year-old man died suddenly at a property on Normandie Avenue shortly after 5pm Wednesday. Police are not treating the death as suspicious and have referred it to the coroner for an inquest. ‘The deceased was a known drug user and his death follows a number of other deaths of drug users in the region in recent weeks,’ said a police spokesperson.
There was the story of a mother in Vermont Square who had narrowly escaped eviction after a court found that she had knowingly allowed her twenty-seven-year-old son to store heroin and crack cocaine in his bedroom. Another about an addict jailed for dealing drugs to a cop. And one more about a successful, undercover police operation that had ‘smashed’ a drugs ring operating out of Boyle Heights.
The problem was in that first story: known drug user. That there was a whole netherworld of dealers, addicts and corrupt cops, themselves addicts; of skeletal teenage girls selling their bodies to pay for the next fix; of men who would roam the city looking for coin boxes, on payphones or parking meters, to smash, hoping to disgorge enough quarters to pay for another bag of powder – that this Hades existed in the streets and alleys of this city, she already knew. It had been part of her beat. After child abuse stories, it was the area of crime reporting she hated most.
But that was not Abigail’s world. No one could have been further from it. Quincy’s words from early this morning – You don’t always know everything – resurfaced once more, as they had all day. Whatever Quincy had meant by that, it surely didn’t extend to Abigail sinking to the level of those lowlifes.
Madison stared at the screen, suddenly aware that she didn’t even know what she was looking for. She sprang back up and paced again, her teeth crunching down on the top of the plastic pen she had been chewing for the last half-hour.
Drug addicts who’d died of drug overdoses were not going to help. She needed to find people like Abigail, those who were avowedly non-junkies who had nevertheless died that way.
But how? As she walked around the room, she thought of the story she would write reporting what had just happened to her sister. What would the headline say?
She rushed back to her seat and typed the words in the search window:
Mystery heroin death
A string of items appeared, one linking to a novel, another to a TV movie, a third to a story in London three years earlier. She added another word to her search. California.
Now the page filled with news stories, including several from the other end of the state and from two or three years earlier. She eliminated those, confining herself only to deaths that had taken place in the last year. Her first click was on the San Diego Mercury Tribune, from nine months ago.
The widow of a San Diego man has filed an unprecedented complaint against the state’s drug rehabilitation program, alleging that he was given an incorrect and excessive dose of the transition drug methadone which led to his …
No. She tried another one. Once more, the problem was a tainted batch of heroin.
She clicked on a third, nearly a year earlier, in Orange County. This told of a grief-stricken father baffled by his daughter’s apparent suicide by heroin overdose. ‘I always thought she loved life too much to kill herself,’ he told reporters. But, in the sixth paragraph, he admitted his daughter had been depressed for several months. Not so baffling after all. She clicked on.
Finally she came across an item in her own paper, just a few paragraphs long, from two weeks earlier.
Padilla family threaten to sue coroner over woman’s death
A Boyle Heights family is demanding the coroner’s department reopen the case of Rosario Padilla, a 22-year-old woman registered as a suicide after she was found dead from a drugs overdose. Mr Mario Padilla, the dead woman’s brother, refuses to accept that his sister took her own life, insisting that ‘she never took drugs in her life, not one single time’.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the coroner’s office said, ‘We very much respect Mr Padilla’s grief at this very difficult time. It is very common for close relatives of those who have died at their own hand to struggle to come to terms with the loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Padilla family.’
Madison could feel a throbbing in her brain. Not a headache, but rather the opposite. A surge of energy or whatever chemical it was that kept her awake even after days without sleep.
She opened a few more tabs, cross-checked the information she had, then sent it to her phone. She grabbed her keys and a coat and left the apartment as it was, not turning out so much as a single light. For the first time since her sister’s death, Madison Webb had an idea.
‘This is all about the sister, right?’
‘Give me a break, Barbara.’ They were at police HQ, round the back by the fire escape – the only area now allowed to smokers, a category that included Barbara Miller, and reliably the best place to catch her.
‘I don’t mind, Jeff. Just admit it. You want me to give you details of a sensitive police investigation so that you can share them with the sister of the deceased
